Death and the Miner

Death and the Miner

The afterlives of gold in South Africa

By Rosalind C. Morris

For more than a century, the gold mines of South Africa were the sparkling center of a nation. Today, they are closing. In their ruins, moving along the more than 10,000 kilometers of underground tunnels that traverse the earth beneath the Witwatersrand—a 56-kilometer rocky scarp jutting 200-meters out of the earth—itinerant migrant miners called zama zamas scavenge for gold.

Historically, mining in this area depended on capital-intensive mechanization, including drilling, automotive and electrified rail transport, large-scale dewatering and oxygenation, as well as cyanide and mercury-based communition processes and industrial smelting. Zama zamas perform all of these functions manually—using only picks, hammers, battery-operated headlamps, and protective clothing woven from jute sacks. Without the assistance of mechanized carriages, they slide down the shafts, following old and fraying cable. Upon finding a potential vein in the rock, they assay samples by panning, and use small amounts of dynamite to blast rock that they carry on their backs in bags that once held rice or corn meal. The men stay underground for days, weeks, even months at a time. Working in small groups of friends and relations who share a language, they sleep and eat, work and rest, listen to music stored on cellphones, smoke cigarettes, and recount stories of home, all while asking their ancestors for help in finding fortune. The word “zama” means to try in isiZulu. “Zama zama” means “to keep on trying,” but also “to gamble.” Zama zamas are those who risk everything to survive.

Above ground, women break the rock with hammers or other rocks. They then grind the broken stone into powder, which is mixed with water and poured over improvised sluicing tables from which the men gather visible nuggets and flakes before sifting the runoff. Finally, this is processed with mercury, which the men pass between their bare fingers, while observing the darkening color that betokens amalgamation. The residual sluice constitutes payment for the women, who then reprocess it. At the end of these gendered activities, which differ in both the time they take and the amount of gold they generate, both men and women sell tiny nuggets to local middlemen, who keep track of spot prices on the international commodities market, and pay in cash. Whether sold independently or brokered by criminal syndicates, the gold will travel along the capillary networks that extend from Johannesburg to China and Pakistan, the US and Europe—where most of it will become jewelry.

Most zama zamas are from Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Lesotho, and Malawi. They travel the same routes as have formal miners since the colonial era, when the Chamber of Mines and its labor recruiting organizations sought African workers for the most arduous labor underground. But today’s zama zamas are mainly undocumented migrants, whose illegalized status excludes them from public education, healthcare, and the rights that citizens expect. The objects of fear and xenophobic violence, they are doubly displaced, hyper-visible in the media and invisible as actual subjects of history.

Why make this arduous journey and expose themselves to such terrifying risks? Quite simply, the extreme poverty that they have left behind exceeds even that of the ruins in which they now seek leftover gold. “The mouth is dreaming,” say zama zamas, when describing the hunger that is their constant companion. Along with the threat of accident and the toxicity of their environment, these men and women are driven by daily need to flirt with death in order to defer it. Nor is the only threat below ground. The powdered rock clouds in the air enters the lungs of the women—and the infants strapped to their backs—just as the dust that rises from the blasted rock enters the lungs of the underground miners. The Oracle of Death writes her prophecy in the lines drawn by sweat or tears on their dust-powdered faces.

Field of Dreams: Zama Zama men walking across the Highveld. Still from We are Zama Zama. Credit: Ebrahim Hajee and Rosalind Morris

Sampling for Gold: Bhekani Mumpande underground. Still from We are Zama Zama. Credit: Prosper Ncube and Rosalind Morris

The hands that grind: woman with ring. Still from We are Zama Zama. Credit: Ebrahim Hajee and Rosalind Morris

Home life: Bhekani and Sarah Mumpande, and their daughter, Alicia, in their 2 x 3-meter shack. Still from We are Zama Zama. Credit: Ebrahim Hajee and Rosalind Morris.

Gold! – Hand-smelted nugget. Still from We are Zama Zama. Credit: Ebrahim Hajee and Rosalind Morris

Dandies at the Dam: Zama Zama boys. Credit: Ebrahim Hajee.

During more than two decades of research around the gold mines of South Africa, I have, perhaps improbably, come to see this underground world as a negative image—in the photographic sense—of the Parisian shopping arcades about which Walter Benjamin wrote nearly a century ago. The vaulted ceilings of the tunnels are made possible by the materials and technologies that also enabled the arcades’ construction. But whereas the arcades of Paris were theaters of display value, where commodities were illuminated as future relics of fashion, the value on display underground is that of technology itself: the incredible feats of engineering that have enabled mining four kilometers below the surface.

But something else links these distant worlds: the economy of the arcades was not merely one of mass reproduction, it was a system in which even waste could be a source of value—and “mined” by the ragpicker. Now, in the ruined gold mines of southern Africa, the ragpicker finds an uncanny doppelganger in the zama zama, whose dusty visage they liken to a ghost. They haunt the landscape where industrial reclamation activities devour the mine dumps: each an emblem of gold-mining’s afterlife.

Benjamin’s milieu provides unexpected parallels for the mine-made world, but it also made powerful contributions to it. Three of the figures behind the largest mining companies in the region, all created in the last decades of the nineteenth century, were German born. Julius Wernher, a Protestant mining engineer from Darmstadt, formed Wernher Beit and Co., with Alfred Beit, a German-Jewish businessman from Hamburg, who started out in real-estate speculation before partnering with Cecil Rhodes in the diamond and gold industries. They created the Wernher-Beit-Eckstein group of companies after joining with the son of a Lutheran pastor named Hermann Eckstein, a financier from Hohenheim, who acted as the first president of the Chamber of Mines.

It is in the ruins of one of the mines founded by Wernher, Beit and Co., that I have been making a film with and about migrant miners. The images in this portfolio are from a documentary project entitled “We are Zama Zama,” which I have been making with South African cinematographer Ebrahim Hajee and three zama zama miners: Rogers “Bhekani” Mumpande, Darren Munenge, and Prosper Ncube. Our shared ambition is to create a documentary testimony to the lived experience of this marginal community in a manner that makes the zama zamas’ risk-filled lives comprehensible.

The project also responds to the intensifying “problem” of migrancy today. As walls—both figurative and actual—are being erected around the world to keep economic migrants from escaping their poverty, the iconography of migrancy in the Euro-American media is increasingly limited to the spectacle of the Mediterranean. While important, the privileged iconography of the Mediterranean risks a too-narrow perception of migrancy as a crisis of and for Europe. Yet, much of the migration born of poverty in Africa takes place within rather than as a movement out of the continent.

In addition to local problems, which range from corruption to warfare, this African crisis also has European history: not only the legacy of resource-based colonialism (of which Wernher, Beit, and Eckstein were a part), but the histories of foreign aid that generated dependencies now being severed. As global neoliberal governance leads to the demand that decolonizing states cut back on their own social-grants programs, a rising tide of populist nationalism calls formerly colonizing states to reduce their foreign- aid contributions. As a result, vast zones of uninhabitability are emerging, a situation that will only worsen with changing climatic conditions.

Making a film about undocumented migrants is not an answer to these problems. But it is an effort to open conversation with a different lens and a widened focus. To ask different questions about the causes and possible means of redress demanded by this complex problem requires, firstly, that the lives lived in industrial modernity’s ruins be recognized in their fullness. The stories of my film, of the ruined mines, and of the migrants who gravitate to those now-abandoned temples of technology and international financial capital, are stories of the future: dream images that the Oracle of Death demands we confront.

by Trenton Doyle Hancock Hancock’s intricate candy-colored prints, drawings, collaged-felt paintings, and site-specific installations work together to tell the story of the “Mounds”—bizarre mythical creatures that are the tragic protagonists of his unfolding narrative between good and evil.

by Kate Brown
In the first two decades that followed the Chernobyl explosion, the Zone of Alienation was off-limits to all but employees and scientists working in the fenced-off region. Many thought of it as the darkest spot on earth. But this picture changed after 2002, when the Ukrainian government opened the zone to a limited, permitted tourism.

by Christina Schwenkel The Reconstrucion of Vinh City with the technical and financial assistance of East Germany was part of a large-scale, multilateral recovery program for Vietnam involving socialist and socialist-leaning countries across Asia, Europe, and Latin America. Like the Marshall Plan of post-WWII Europe, an emphasis on industrialization to regenerate the economy channeled massive investments into the rebuilding of infrastructure.

by David Lazar A book review of alumna Mary Cappello's book on mood, and how it works in and with us as complicated, imperfectly self-knowing beings existing in a world that impinges and infringes on us, but also regularly suffuses us with beauty and joy and wonder.

by Ioana Uricaru
Excerpt from a screen play. Moji is a US immigration official; Mara is a Romanian woman who has recently married an American,
after having known him for only two months. Moji is in charge of her greencard application.

by Mary Ellen Carroll and Mohammad AttarBerlin-based exiled Syrian playwright Mohammad Al Attar spoke with conceptual artist and spring 2016 Academy fellow Mary Ellen Carroll about the theater as a political form of art and about the current situation in Syria.

by Thomas Chatterton Williams
In this new short story, New York Times Magazine writer Thomas Chatterton Williams details writing in Paris and falling in love, having a mixed-race toddler, and time in Sweden.

by Virág MolnárRight-wing radicalism has been on the rise across Europe as evidenced by the growing popularity of populist-nationalist parties like Front National in France, or the UKIP in the UK, and is likely to increase further in the wake of the current European refugee and migrant crisis.

by Michael J. Watts It is hard to exaggerate the devastation that Boko Haram has unleashed upon vast tracts of the northeast of Nigeria since 2009 and the horror it has wrought by attacks across the country’s Muslim north, including in major cities such as Kano, and the capital, Abuja.

by Steven Hill As German start-ups aim to duplicate the Silicon Valley model, our alumnus Steve Hill, in his new book Die Startup Illusion, asks if it best serves the European social model. Herewith, an exclusive essay for the Berlin Journal, derived from Hill's Introduction.

by Leonard Barkan The opening pages of Leonard Barkan's new book may amount to the most joyous authobiographical take offs; the book itself will continue with a kind of archaeology of Berlin's Jewish past via a reading of the graves of the cemetery at the Schönhauser Allee.

Daniel Joseph Martinez
There’s always a problem with Daniel Joseph Martinez’s artwork, one attended by the perpetual question, “Just who or what is the subject here?” To ask this question is exactly the point.

by Jeremy King A book review of alumna Tara Zara's recent book which explores how debates about and experiences of emigration shaped competing ideals of freedom in Eastern Europe and "the West" over the course of one hundred years.

by Hari Kunzru "The poet does not care about his surroundings, or if he does, he’s making the best of things. He is absorbed in his artistic labor. This was how I wanted to be, who I wanted to be, at least for a while."

Stay in touch with the American Academy and receive invitations to our events in Berlin as well as in the US and other German cities. We’ll also share American Academy publications, podcasts, videos, and news about our guests and alumni.

Sign up for our newsletter!

Stay in touch with the American Academy and receive invitations to our events in Berlin as well as in the US and other German cities. We’ll also share American Academy publications, podcasts, videos, and news about our guests and alumni.